August 08, 2006

Bloody Sunday

Catholics were unanimous in calling the shooting unprovoked murder and ridiculed the army version that troops themselves had come under heavy gunfire.

Widgery exonerated the soldiers, saying some of the dead might have been armed before they were hit. He said troops came under fire when they tried to arrest rioters after clashes on the fringe of the rally.

Catholics say the Widgery Report was "a whitewash" which slandered unarmed people who were caught in a hail of army fire.

[...] NEW EVIDENCE

Britain's Channel 4 television news and Don Mullan, an Irish human rights activist, have both come up with new evidence that soldiers may have opened fire from the 17th century city walls above the Catholic Bogside area.

Mullan said Widgery dealt only with the rounds fired by paratroopers at ground level but said eyewitness statements and ballistics opinion suggested three of the victims may have been killed by army sniper fire from the walls. "This was not the paratroopers coming in on a scoop-up arrest operation. This was the working out of a much wider military operation on that day," said Mullan, who has studied original statements by civilians for a new book "Eye Witness Bloody Sunday."

Daly said one lesson of Bloody Sunday was that military punishment of civilians in peaceful protest does not work.

"I think it is imperative that the British government quite unequivocally admits what happened, in other words that paratroopers deliberately killed innocent civilians -- picking them out and targetting them individually -- and apologise for it."

On January 30, 1972, soldiers from the British Army's 1st Parachute Regiment opened fire on unarmed and peaceful civilian demonstrators in the Bogside, Derry, Ireland, near the Rossville flats, killing 13 and wounding a number of others. One wounded man later died from illness attributed to that shooting.

The march, which was called to protest internment, was "illegal" according to British government authorities. Internment without trial was introduced by the British government on August 9, 1971.

The British-government-appointed Widgery Tribunal found soldiers were not guilty of shooting dead the 13 civilians in cold blood.

This ties in nicely with what Ravana at bookworm room said, that the British were more disciplined than the US military and that was why the Shia areas were not like the US controled ones.